Spectator Life

From the lilting normcore of Sally Rooney’s Normal People to the frenetic genius of poetic, post-(post?) punk band Fontaines D.C., I’m drawn to talented Irish voices of late. Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated tragicomedy, The Banshees of Inisherin, won three Golden Globes, and my heart, to boot. And quite rightly. It’s news to no one that the Irish have always been exceptional storytellers; some stereotypes stick because they are true. Plenty of the finest words ever written hail from the town of the hurdled ford, Baile Átha Cliath, Dublin. This fact was recognized by UNESCO in 2010, when they named it a City of Literature.

When I arrived in East Palestine, Ohio, on Wednesday, the quaint Main Street was a red, white and blue sea of people waiting in chilly, drizzly weather for Donald Trump to arrive. I met up with Brian and Samantha, who live three miles from the site of the Norfolk Southern train derailment. They were acting as Tulsi Gabbard’s tour guide and graciously invited me to tag along. The East Palestine area is a typical rural community. Villages with little more than a volunteer fire department and a basic convenience-style store are scattered across the countryside. People enjoy their space and peace and quiet, but they’re also close-knit and neighborly.

At around eleven in the morning on February 28, 2001, I was standing in front of a mirror in my home in suburban Seattle, adjusting what remained of my hair prior to driving downtown to meet a friend for lunch, when the ground began to shake beneath my feet. The movement lasted about twenty seconds and wasn’t entirely unpleasant, with just the slightest hint of the old days when I was a devotee of Bacchus. After a bit, I checked that the house was all right, looked in on my infant son peacefully asleep in his crib, said goodbye to my wife, started the car and went on my way into the city. It was bedlam out there.

America's appetite for football is seemingly never satisfied. A couple leagues are still working to crack the code on maintaining a professional alternative to the NFL. Even with the NFL adding a seventeenth regular season game in 2021, the league's off-season is significantly longer than the other major team sports. Whereas there is typically a four-month layover from the end of the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final and the beginning of the next basketball and hockey seasons respectively, and Major League Baseball has about five months off from the close of the World Series to Opening Day, the NFL is dormant for nearly seven months. And college football's off-season is roughly a month longer. That's a lot of blank space for a sport that routinely draws huge interest.

These shoes aren’t real. They’re not NFTs or AI-generated. They’re actual shoes. They look like Nikes but, for the most part, they weren’t made by Nike. They’re the work of Hvnd Studio, a small team of Korean cobblers who work in a legally-dubious cottage industry, recreating the original, 1985 Jordan 1 with top-quality leather and classic techniques. They’re fakes. They’re beautiful. And they cost $1,250. If Nike is the sneaker brand, then the 1985 Jordan 1 is the sneaker. It’s a classic of twentieth-century product and a pop-culture icon, tied to the mythos of Michael Jordan. These days, an unworn original pair with its box can sell for more than $20,000. Adding to the allure is the shoe’s messy path to cultural reverence.

In 2013, I was studying for a Master’s degree in Beirut when a bomb went off in Baghdad. I remember receiving a message from a friend checking in to see if I was all right — even though I was 500 miles away. It can be hard to convey to people back in the United States that violence in the Middle East is not necessarily a part of everyday life. At times — in Iraq in the years following the US invasion, for example — it is. But such attacks are usually a tragic anomaly. All this stands in stark contrast to news about the earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria, which struck last week and killed at least 36,000 people.

Progressives have long sought ways to get us out of our cars. In recent months, a little-reported trend has emerged in furtherance of this goal: the elimination of parking minimums for new housing developments. A host of cities has done this, either citywide or in select districts, among them Anchorage, San Jose, Raleigh, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Sacramento. California’s Gavin Newsom recently became the first governor to sign legislation prohibiting parking minimums statewide for projects within a half mile of a major transit stop. Liberal policymakers contend that parking minimums are bad for the climate and make housing needlessly expensive by forcing everyone, including those who don’t own cars, to pay for parking.

In the run up to the Super Bowl, writers were tripping over themselves trying to capture the essence of the Philadelphia Eagles Fan™. Most of these observations focused on the degenerate behavior of a few diehards after key games, or the nonsensical yet diverse array of superstitious traditions (looking at you, guy who runs into the underground pillars on the Broad Street Line on purpose). Some dug up the old chestnut about Santa Claus getting pelted by snowballs at an Eagles game — ignoring that many of the fans responsible for that misadventure died without ever seeing the Birds win a ring.

Republicans are in disarray... over the outcome of the Super Bowl, where they’ll be watching and even if they’ll be watching it at all. In the days leading up to the year’s premier sporting event, I spoke with dozens of House Republicans to get the lowdown on their plans. A bitterly divided House Republican caucus is siding with the underdog Kansas City Chiefs by a vote of 17-10 (five who won’t be watching). One congresswoman thinks this because “Patrick Mahomes is fucking hot” while others back them as they have Mahomes and Travis Kelce as constituents. But some GOP reps are picking the Eagles, because of spousal pressure in Marc Molinaro’s case, or simply because “it’s the Eagles’ year,” according to Darrell Issa.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has released new guidelines on childhood obesity, advocating that children receive medication and even surgery as early as twelve years old to avoid long-term health consequences. The authors of the new guidelines argue against the historical belief that obesity can be overcome exclusively by lifestyle changes. They say that doesn’t adequately address “socioecological, environmental and genetic influences” that affect children. Childhood obesity rates, however, are higher than they’ve been in fifty years — and genetics didn’t cause the concerning rise. The most obvious changes in the Western lifestyle since then have included a massive increase in processed foods and the integration of the internet into everyday life.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced a bill that, if passed, would make the day after the Super Bowl a statewide holiday. The initial version of the bill also proposed removing Columbus Day as a holiday. With Republicans dominating the state legislature, two Democrats offering a popular, seemingly apolitical holiday in exchange for eliminating a more controversial, clearly politicized one was unlikely to fly. So it's unsurprising they've dropped that stipulation. The idea of a holiday the day after the Super Bowl has been a pipe dream for NFL fans for almost as long as the Super Bowl has existed, and the subject comes up just about every year around this time.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in New York. You’re at a bar having some beers with your friends, watching the youngest quarterback matchup ever. You think the Eagles have got this in the bag. In fact, you think they’ll win 33-28 — so you hand the bartender five bucks and enter the establishment’s squares gambling pool, where you’re betting on the final digits of what the score will be. Suddenly, the door bursts open. The cops are here. They shout “we hear there’s gambling going on in this establishment!” and slap the owner with a massive fine. A nightmare? Sure.

It’s an article of faith on the left that misinformation and conspiracy theories originate almost exclusively from the right. But consider the media’s coverage of the latest controversy over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (or any that preceded it). Florida recently rejected a planned Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies curriculum that DeSantis argued would indoctrinate children. The curriculum includes works from proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the abolition of prisons and police. There are units on Black Queer studies, the case for reparations, “Black feminist literary thought,” BLM, intersectionality, and other pet progressive causes. “In the state of Florida, our education standards required students to study Black history,” DeSantis explained.

In Sunday's AFC Championship game, the refs played a role in the outcome, as they sometimes do in the NFL. Most glaringly, at least according to some fans, the officials in the fourth quarter gave the Chiefs an additional attempt at a third down when they ruled they'd whistled the action dead before a failed Kansas City play, citing the fact that the game clock had begun to tick again despite the Chiefs' second-down play being an incomplete pass. On the Chiefs' next attempt at third down, quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked. However, Cincinnati cornerback Eli Apple was called for defensive holding, extending the drive. Kansas City ended up winning the game 23-20 to advance to Super Bowl LVII.

Six months of the year, I’m a (wannabe) Lisboeta, “a person from Lisbon.” A peripatetic British food and travel journalist somewhat scuppered by Brexit, I’m allowed in the Schengen Area for up to ninety days in any 180-day block. I max them out before I’m sent packing. I’ve come to think of these moments in time as “chapters,” in a half-hearted attempt to romanticize the loss of my border privileges. Lisbon is the object of my affections — and has become my base for European chapters from which I breathlessly ping between countries. I try new dishes and try not to fall in love with anyone before I’m ordered home (rather inconvenient: "getting married for the visa" jokes grow less and less funny).

The latest news in the Hamline University saga is that a large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign. Miller had played the principal part in the dismissal of art history instructor Erika López Prater, after Prater had shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class. One image was a slide of a fourteenth-century painting by a Muslim artist; the other was Muslim painting from the sixteenth century in which the Prophet is veiled. Condemnation of the Hamline administration for dismissing Prater has been nearly universal in American higher education.

Who is Ali Slagle? A fan of New York Times Cooking might recognize the name: nine of their fifty most popular recipes of 2022 are credited to her, the most of any of their contributors, including household names like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Melissa Clark. But despite the tremendous popularity of her recipes, Slagle herself is a bit mysterious. She crops up, cheerfully and occasionally, on NYT Cooking channels. Her 142,000 Instagram followers are a mere fraction of the followings of her food-celebrity contemporaries, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman, or Claire Saffitz. She doesn’t appear to be developing a platform; she has no Twitter, no Substack, no YouTube channel. She appears to live in a camper van.

I rarely open, let alone read, promotional emails, but one I got last summer about the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida captured my attention. The place was described as a “playground for the 1 percent... where that Ralph Lauren picture-perfect fantasy is within reach — if only for a night.” The message referred to rubbing elbows with the rich and famous and I wondered what on earth they were talking about. After all, the super-rich in Florida mostly congregate further south in Palm Beach and the affluent bits of Miami, right? Ocala is a small city ninety miles northwest of Disney World and it’s long billed itself the horse capital of the world.

Few things whip American sports fans into a frenzy more than a downtrodden franchise finally about to get off the schneid. Baseball especially in recent decades has gloried in this, first with the Boston Red Sox ending their eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004 and then the Chicago Cubs breaking the Curse of the Billy Goat that had lasted over a century. That the NFL has its own version of this flies in the face of the league's gushing about its parity of talent. If several teams have gone the entire modern era without sniffing the promised land, surely that parity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there are a small handful of teams that NFL fans recognize as especially tortured, and few would deny the Buffalo Bills their place as a top woebegone franchise.